Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?

I'd have to say I also am not her intended audience.

I'd hasten to add that the book I read was NOT like that page at all

Yes I think that was her debut work.

I will be starting on Josef Winkler "When the time comes" shortly - also translated by Adrian West and he said somewhere her main work will never be translated but I don't see why you couldn't get at least a volume's worth across to English to get the flavour of the work - looks like a cross of Stein and Cardew's Treatise.

love this from that paris review thing:

"In general, the detractors of long, complex, unorthodox, or vexatious books have their counterpart in a small but fervent cult of readers: Joyceans, Nabokovians, those who claim to think highly of William Burroughs. In many cases, the esteem that accrues to difficult authors has little to do with their being read; a genius is born not of resolute bookworms slogging through arcane texts but of that critical mass of reviews, essays, and dissertations required to generate the clichés the reading public needs in order to sound intelligent—to make the comparison, no less inept for its ubiquity, of Knausgaard to Proust, or to apply the adjective Kafkaesque to any story about bureaucracy."

Wow.

He is an idiot, even if I'll always like him for bringing Josef Winkler into English.

Ugly THings #40 which is as good as the previous ones I've read and is almost book size. THis smoring I read the interview with Stu Boy king the original drummer with the Dictators tracing the history of the band at least up until they kicked him out.

Also read the thing on the Wrecking Crew which makes me want to see the new documentary thing.

Also reading Facing the Wrong Way the 4Ad biography still. Very interesting. Got as far as Dead can Dance''s Spleen and Ideal

Wrecking Crew doc interesting but mildly disappointing as these things can be.

wrecking crew doc gave me some chills just because the people involved are so friggin' cool and it's kinda unbelievable that they were a part of so many amazing things, but, yeah, it's not that illuminating. more like one of those labor of love things done by someone who isn't that probing. cool just to hear those people talk though. and see them.

Yup

Hadnt even realised there was a 4AD book, sounds very promising

Suhrkamp, whose director, the legendary Siegfried Unseld, hoped to market Fritz as a “female Joyce.”

A female Arno Schmidt wasn't good enough?

4AD book was in Fopp as a 2 for £5 choice. I mainly grabbed it to get the Julian Cope novel 131.
Very interesting so far. I didn't know much of the history. Just familiar with bits of the music.

Lately I've been reading Alex Mar's Witches in America, which is breezy but facile: Mar tries to put her own personality, suspended between the longing for connection with greater forces and a reflexive skepticism, at the center of her reportage on various traditions of American paganism, but she mostly winds up seeming smug. The book is interesting enough on the merits of its subject matter, but even as Mar interviews self-identified necromancers and hangs out in swamps to undergo Crowleyan initiations, the prose never really becomes lively enough to dispel the impression that this is the kind of book about researching witchcraft a Slate contributor would write.

I've also finally gotten around to Balzac's Pere Goriot; in some ways I think I like Balzac less for his own sake than for that of the writers for whom he opens a path, but I appreciate his attention to the phantasmagoric grime of city
Iife and the way he undercuts the possible sentimentality of the plot by hinting at the perverse qualities of Goriot's consuming paternal love.

I've also been reading Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and Seduction and Betrayal: the former is one of the most successful attempts to construct a novel by the juxtaposition of lyrical fragments that I've read lately. (I'm also just a sucker, for boring personal reasons, for writers who recollect youth in Kentucky with a cold eye from a northern remove.)

Finally, I've posted about her in the ILE obituary thread, but in the days since the writer and activist Bryn Kelly's intensely saddening death, I've been reading and rereading her essays and blogs: her story "Other Balms, Other Gileads" is still one of the most moving things I've read about the everyday experience of HIV stigma today, although it doesn't quite prepare one for the scathing humor of her pseudonymous writing on medical bureaucracy and queer relationships as the Hussy and the Party Bottom. Links to most of her writing can be found here: http://topsidepress.tumblr.com/post/137350042394/i-love-your-profound-insecurity-i-love-you-even

*Witches of America, that is

Finished Pickwick Papers. Not great. His most successful novel I'm told, certainly the best selling whilst he was alive. But I found it bitty.

Started War And Peace. Not sure the chapter a day scheme suits me so I'm going for a book a month. There are 15 I think. First one is a manageable 150 pages.

Kevin Barry - Beatlebone --- very funny, lovely writing, even makes a shit like John Lennon seem likeable

after four years finally finished against the day... guess i'd have to read the whole thing straight through again to make some kind of sense of all the interweaving narrative strands that i'd completely forgotten about. one day, maybe.

Hate it when that happens.

that's one of the reasons i keep restarting 'mason & dixon' instead of just finishing it

now trying to decide whether i should read the last two thirds of finnegans wake or alternatively try to find where i got up to in tristram shandy

I went back and finished up the second half of Pierre Hadot's The Veil of Isis, which I put aside last year. That is a cool book, about the idea in Western culture of nature as veiled and elusive (and, apparently, many-breasted)

http://a405.idata.over-blog.com/364x600/4/18/31/72/Images-2/Lucrece-Frontispice.JPG

I also have a bit left in Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism, which I probably should not have stuck with since it isn't quite what I was looking for, and I'm nearly finished Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which is amazing.

JUst had Girl In A Band delivered this afternoon so read the first chapter of that so might be the first thing I read from now with something being slightly put back. Looks very interesting, sorry to read the bitter feelings though.

now trying to decide whether i should read the last two thirds of finnegans wake or alternatively try to find where i got up to in tristram shandy

― no lime tangier, Wednesday, 20 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some ny resolutions you have made for yrself!

Tristram Shandy will be waaaaaay more rewarding

posted in the hope it will amuse you all as much as it amused me, a letter from Hunter S Thompson to Anthony Burgess...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX73jDVU0AA4l4R.jpg

does burgess's non-clockwork stuff belong on the unfashionable writers thread? who the hell reads that stuff? and there is a lot of it too.

i just counted. 33 novels. and then there are 30+ other non-fiction things. and is any of it in print in the u.s. other than ACO? the U.K. is obviously a different kettle of kipper. is he big in europe still? i must know.

Also, i started the third in Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy. Ancillary Mercy.

xpost
Burgess def seems like one of those post-war Brits whose books are largely going out of print (the odd 'hit' like Clockwork Orange excepted) - Angus Wilson, William Cooper, John Braine, John Wain, even Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene.

The biography of Burgess by Roger Lewis is prob the most entertaining hatchet job I've ever read.

yeah, greene was in print here consistently for decades and now you would have a tough time finding anything new.

i mean i'm guessing that greene sold more in the u.s. than all those other people combined with the exception of clockwork which was a book that everyone had to buy even if they never read it.

with amis i would come across tons of paperbacks of lucky jim over the years and not much else. and he wrote a ton. even his kid doesn't seem that popular around these parts anymore. feel like london fields was the height of his popularity and that was quite a while ago.

There's a Europa edition of Earthly Powers in print. I finished it but didn't like it very much. I've read that and Clockwork and I don't think Burgess is a writer for me.

NYRB have been reissuing some Kingsley Amis, and I think they are going to issue a vol of his poetry

Burgess is a funny one - I think he's got a little cult still, people with a real mania for Earthly Powers in particular (met someone recently who's read it like 6 times, it's their favourite book), but yeah… he wrote so much, but I've only ever really seen Earthly Powers, Clockwork Orange, the Enderby novels and Nothing Like the Sun knocking about in shops.

his books are still in plentiful supply here in secondhand book shops, anyhow. other than clockwork think i've only read his 60's bond knock-off/parody tremor of intent. do have a copy of 1985 but looking through it seems like it's nothing but an old reactionary's lament for the way of the world.

Nothing Like the Sun and Dead Man in Deptford (his Christopher Marlowe novel) both hold up well, and I see Earthly Powers in used bookstores fairly often, but among my reader friends I don't really ever hear him talked about outside the context of Clockwork Orange.

Oh, and Re Joyce is one of the better introductions to Joyce I've read (I don't know what this says about its availability now, but I remember having it at hand during my first time going through Ulysses as a teenager).

Bowie otm re Earthly Powers.

Yes in my 2nd hand trawls the Burgess I come across the most are intros to Joyce.

sometimes see copies of that truncated fw that he edited, and just wonder what the purpose of doing that would be? never looked inside, so maybe it has valuable editorial matter...

Best novels of his I've read are Earthly Powers a Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and a few others from the same era: Honey For The Bears and The Doctor Is Sick.

Oh and search the first volume of the autobio Little Wilson and Big God. But destroy the second volume You've Had Your Time. Follows the classic pattern of: this it is was really like to be me in the Old Weird AmericaBritain, End of Book I, *Fame and *Fortune, Remarriage* Begin Book II And then I wrote... Darn these kids, etc.

if anyone can ever find burgess's intro to the u.k. edition of last exit to brooklyn online lemme know. be interested in reading that.

I've read maybe six or seven books by Burgess. I especially liked the first of his Enderby books, and generally found his novels to be competently written with just enough intellectual skew to give them added point and interest.

He was smart and well read, and it showed, but that's never really enough on its own, is it? He had an idiosyncratic set of opinions and prejudices, but the majority of them were reactionary and backward-facing. The best I can say for him is that he never wrote a book Oprah could endorse.

btw, I am currently reading a large collection of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the Library of America compilations.

william golding will likewise always have one book in print in the states. man do we love that one book though.

Heh, just the other day I was reading the Paris Review interview with Gore Vidal and was surprised by this part:

VIDAL

I wouldn’t say that I am fanatically attentive. There’s only one living writer in English that I entirely admire, and that’s William Golding. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Italian and French writers. I particularly like Italo Calvino.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think Golding good?

VIDAL

Well, his work is intensely felt. He holds you completely line by line, image by image. In The Spire you see the church that is being built, smell the dust. You are present at an event that exists only in his imagination. Very few writers have ever had this power. When the priest reveals his sores, you see them, feel the pain. I don’t know how he does it.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever met him?

VIDAL

Once, yes. We had dinner together in Rome. Oxford don type. I like his variety: Each book is quite different from the one before it. This confuses critics and readers, but delights me. For that reason I like to read Fowles—though he is not in Golding’s class. Who else do I read for pleasure? I always admire Isherwood. I am not given to mysticism—to understate wildly, but he makes me see something of what he would see. I read P. G. Wodehouse for pleasure. Much of Anthony Burgess.

interesting to see that vidal rated fowles (somewhat). & speaking of, there's a nice appreciation of golding in his wormholes collection of essays/occasional pieces.

yeah I've picked up a few burgess books 2nd hand but only read enderby & clockwork orange, earthly powers appeals to me & I keep meaning to read it. picked up a book of essays embarrassingly titled homage to qwertyuiop and iirc the 1st essay was moaning about feminism and I stopped reading, this may be an unfair (semi)recollection tho. I liked his listicle book about the best novels since the war

99 Novels? That is fun.